As some of you may already be aware, we have begun construction of a new forum as a rebirth of PHO and continuing on into future projects.
This forum is called Silph Co., and can be found by clicking the banner below. We are in the process of transferring some of our old resources, and the forum is open for posting. It will be sad to see PHO go, but we look forward to a bright future with Silph.
The forums here will be moved to an archive, and the url will redirect to the new site in the coming days/weeks.

News & UpdatesThis is the place to get the latest news and updates about PHO.

Hey guys, this is an announcement to tell you all that Pokémon Hackers Online is back, RHO is no more. You might be wondering what's going on over the past day with all the changes, so I'm going to go over every update that we've done in this announcement, as well as welcoming back PHO.

Why did we change back to PHO again?
The reason we went back to the name PHO is because of many things, but mainly about what our focus is and has always been: hacking Pokémon. Everyone on the site is a Pokémon ROM Hacker (or should be), and everyone from the past is a Pokémon ROM Hacker. Not to mention, all of our content is Pokémon related.

We tried to change things up and reach a broader audience with the introduction of ROM Hackers Online back in December 2012, but despite this offering we didn't get the audience we desired visiting the site, and things stayed how they were up until today (with a small gap in the middle when the site was offline).

A year ago from now on October 6th 2012, I became the new owner of PHO. Back then the site was more of a replica of PC than a hacking site. Our members were not hacking, and were more interested in playing in off-topic or other sections. And, like PC, we had a range of Pokémon discussion sections. Throughout the year this is what I wanted to strive for. A place that's designed for hackers and attracts hackers, rather than any other audience. With PHO today, it's purely focused at Pokémon ROM Hacking, with a bit of Game Dev as well.

So, today, I'm proud to announce we've decided to go back to the past and become Pokémon Hackers Online once more.

Where are all the staff?
Some may have noticed already, but we've cut down on a lot of staff members. This was for many reasons, some that we won't mention here. The main reason is we can run the site right now with a smaller staff team due to activity and size. With a smaller staff team, things get done quicker as we get peoples opinions faster without having to wait for everyones vote, especially if some staff are not very active.

So, until our activity picks up and there's a demand for further members of staff, things will stay how they are currently.

The new (old) domain is up
Naturally with this change of name there comes a change of domain, and for this I have to apologise as nobody wants to remember a new name or change bookmarks. But, from now on (and since last night) you can browse the site using www.pokemonhackersonline.com. Since this is still in propagation, I'll make www.romhackersonline.com redirect to the new domain sometime this evening.

I lost my favourite style!
This is another thing we decided to do, disable a lot of the styles we had and pick 2-3 of the best ones for people to use. This is so PHO's theme and style becomes a memorable place for everyone and a consistent experience to what to expect from PHO. The 3 styles which are available now are Black 2 (and 2.1), PHO 2007: Reimagined and Super RHO. We believe these 3 styles are part of the core PHO experience and want everyone to experience that. New styles might created in the future, we'll see how things go.

Condensed and tweaked forum layout
Not much changes but we condensed the forum layout a bit so all hacking topics are in a ROM Hacking section instead of the separate sections we had in the past. Also, the image links to view hacks from different consoles have been removed from the front page as they took up a lot of space, and many of them are not in use. However, the forum listing still shows the console image next to the thread.

New censor system in place
This is something that should have happened years ago. A few months ago we enacted a harsh censoring across the forums, which replaced every bad word with ****. Well, something was suggested yesterday to swap these words with funny words. So we thought that was a fucking great idea and all you bitches would love it, so I implemented it.

Something important to say, and maybe it's just me, but this makes me want to swear across the forums just for the fun of it. But guys, please *don't* do this. The staff know the words that are replaced (and the original post can be edited to see the original words) so you will be warned or infracted if we see excessive "swearing" across the forums.

So, what now?
Good question, now that we're PHO again nothing exactly has changed, except for solidifying our core focus again. We'll be building our social media presence and will begin to approach different audiences via different advertisement methods. In addition to this we have a couple of things to clear up still. There's thousands of Pokémon fans and players out there, just imagine if we could make them all become PHO ROM Hackers?

Phew, this was a lot of work. I'll repost this for those too lazy to click the link

Quote:

Just to clear things up, there is a lot of change going on. We've actually been talking about doing this for a while now, but today after some pretty intense debates, we decided it was time to light the fuse, so to speak. As Kristian has pointed out, many changes have been made:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Linkandzelda

Just a quick update on this situation, in case people havent noticed various changes around the forum taking place. Here's a few:

Change with the staff, if you want to see take a look at showgroups.php

An in depth announcement will be made shortly about all this with more info and where we're going with it all.

We still have ways to go before this shift is complete, so here are some things you can expect in the near future:

Domain: The old domain will soon redirect to pokemonhackersonline.com. We still have a few tweaks to make (or more like Kristian has a few tweaks to make).

Rules, stickies and spam: We have lots of content and threads to either move, delete, stick, or create. The forums have been quite loose lately and we have some cleaning up to do, so expect that to be done in the very near future.

Styles: Let me be clear, these are no where near priority status at the time. However, because of the name change, we had to hide/remove most of the skins. Black 2 and PHO 2007: Reimagined will need some tweaking as they were never actually completed. I'll be doing that soon. You can expect a few more skins in the near future, skins I've been planning for a while, but not until we get all the important stuff out of the way.

Branching out: We're going to be discussing how we can branch out, as mentioned above, into different property hacks. Mario/Sonic/etc hacks will soon be welcomed in a designated area within the forums. Alternatively, we might just allow them within the same sub-forum as all the other hacks. We're currently discussing this matter.

Staff: Laying off the staff was a difficult decision. There was a lot of drama regarding whether or not we should have done this, and the administrative team responsible for the decision (Linkandzelda, Team Fail, Pia Carrot, and myself) were split between those who supported the change and those who didn't. In the end we decided to go through with it, and decided that as activity began to pick up, we would start hiring again. Don't expect this anytime soon, however.

Getting the word out: We have a couple ideas being thrown around at the moment, but rest assured that something is being done to get PHO back on its feet and kicking in no time at all!